3 Big Ideas… and a low-level VNX discussion

Varrow knows how to hold a great event.  Their inaugural “Varrow Madness” happened on thursday last week at the majestic Grandover resort in Greensboro, NC.   It was attended by about 100 230 customers, and the pantheon of Varrow technology partners, including VMware, EMC, and Cisco.

I broke out two new pieces of content – since I was lucky enough to be presenting the morning keynote, and then a second session on EMC VNX.

I’ve attached video of both below, along with the powerpoint content for and EMCers, EMC partners, or EMC customers that are interested.  Read on!

To get a sense of the event, here’s a quick walkaround the back of the room where EMC had it’s area – booth, hands-on-lab (I talked to two people actually doing the labs) and other cool stuff.

THANK YOU VARROW – you are a great EMC partner!

Read on for the videoes and raw ppt content…

The first piece of content was the keynote.   As I said in the opener, I intentionally tried to keep it as open-ended as possible.  Rather than an “EMC rocks” (though I think we are great – not perfect by any means – but great) session, I wanted to make it a “here are the 3 big ideas that are keeping our propellers spinning”.   These three ideas are:

1. Enterprise Data – with the amount of data in enterprises exploding, what does the storage industry as a whole need to do to contain the cost, keep things simple, but hit customer needs?    And as workloads shift from physical to virtual hosts for almost everything – what does that mean?
2. Big Data – Outside the walls of the “traditional” enterprise the volume of data growth is staggering.   First of all – I tried to humanize this using creative analogies.   Second, a discussion about where it’s coming from (in the realms of genomics/geophysics and other HPC; social media; web 2.0; media).  Third, things we can do to make in an opportunity instead of something scary.
3. Cloud – while, as I said in the speech, it is so overused it’s the home run in buzzword bingo – there’s no denying it is a big idea.   It is an idea that is central in our information technology domain, and for good reason.  Even putting hyperbole aside, it COULD be one of the biggest things to transform the way we do IT – perhaps ever.    BTW - this contains me doing the “EMC’s view of Cloud in 4:40 – pekka kucha style – 20 slides x 20 seconds each” bit :-)

Varrow Madness 2011 EMC Keynote from Chad Sakac on Vimeo.

You can download the raw PPT here (warning, all the pictures make this a big deck – about 30MB)

Also, in the afternoon, I presented a second topic – a lower-level discussion (ergo into the weeds of hardware/software function) around EMC VNX.   Whereas the keynote was intentionally relatively vendor free (only points where to explain our worldview, rather than pitch a product), this is as product-centric as it gets :-)

My Flip ran out of space mid-stream, so here it is in two parts (thanks Tee for being quick with his iPhone).

Varrow Madness VNX Presentation part 1 from Chad Sakac on Vimeo.

 

 

 

Varrow Madness VNX Presentation part 2 from Chad Sakac on Vimeo.

You can download the raw PPT here.

Enjoy!  As always – courteous comments welcome!

Comments

[BrandonJRiley]

Great presentations Chad. It was nice to get more detailed info on VNX.

[Mark Burgess]

Hi Chad,

Following on from our discussion at VMware PEX I have been trying to get my head around how to configure FAST VP pools. Your presentation above states that we can mix EFDs, SAS and NL-SAS in a single pool, but they must be the same RAID type.

I also understand that EMC's best practice for capacity drives (1TB/2TB NL-SAS/SATA) is to use RAID 6 due to the long rebuild times should a drive fail.

As we want to create FAST VP pools that consist of EFD, SAS and NL-SAS drives this leaves us with a bit of a problem.

We can either:

1. Use RAID 5 - thereby breaking EMC's best practice on using RAID 6 for NL-SAS drives
2. Use RAID 6 - which will have a write performance impact on Flash and SAS drives and decrease the usable capacity

What is EMC's recommended RAID type for heterogeneous pools with large capacity drives?

I have searched PowerLink extensively but I cannot find a statement from EMC on this.

Also the VNX Reference architecture for VMware View uses FAST VP with NL-SAS drives in a RAID 5 configuration going against EMC's best practice!!!

You can see why I am getting confused!!!

Many thanks
Mark

[dewey hylton]

i enjoyed the event and both of your talks. thanks for the great information!